MapR Technologies, provider of a popular distribution of Apache Hadoop, has partnered with Elasticsearch to integrate the company's real-time search and analytics technology into its distro.

The companies said the integration would enable users to store and search a massive amount of data in real time. The combination gives developers a scalable, distributed architecture for run fast search queries.

Elasticsearch's open source software is downloaded about 500,000 times every month, according to the company.

Shay Banon said the integration would give MapR users a full-blow search engine that scales across any amount of data. “With Elasticsearch, developers and data-hungry businesses now have a way to ask better questions of their data and get clearer answers, significantly faster, in return,” he said.

Jack Norris, CMO at MapR, said the company's customers were embracing enterprise data hubs, where terabytes upon terabytes of unstructured data are consolidated across the entire organization. “Elasticsearch and MapR together give customers production-ready technologies that enable real-time access for retrieving and analyzing big data stored in Hadoop.”

MapR made the announcement the same day two of its important competitors made big announcements of their own.

Hortonworks, vendor of another popular Hadoop distribution, released the latest version of its software, incorporating newest releases by the open source Apache Hadoop community.

Pivotal, the EMC- and VMware-owned software company, rolled out a service that packages all of its database technologies under one contract, charging users based on the amount of compute cores involved in using any of the products. Customers that sign up for using the package for a certain minimum period of time get an unlimited license for Pivotal's Hadoop distribution.